PhD Project

The Effect of Happiness on Entrepreneurship

Following the growing interest and research in positive emotion/affect in entrepreneurship, we elaborate the meaning of “positive” and introduce the concept of “happiness” to extend this dialogue by adding evaluation and virtue into consideration. This project includes three chapters which are subsequently based on a different level of analysis—individual, firm and country. We classify the concept of happiness into three distinct pathways (pleasant happiness, judgmental happiness and moral happiness) and the main aim is to explore whether distinct meaning of happiness could have different effect on entrepreneurship in different situation. Specifically, in chapter one we propose that entrepreneur happiness can exert a strong impact on his or her effectual reasoning which is recently proposed as the distinguished character of entrepreneur in creating new ventures and two of its assumed antecedents—environmental uncertainty and entrepreneurial expertise can positively moderate this relationship. In chapter two, we propose that happiness and effectual reasoning of top managers can be positively related to venture entrepreneurial engagement—entrepreneurial orientation and then the venture performance, but the effect will diminish as the time passes after the venture is built. In chapter three, we propose that country level happiness could be a critical factor leading to one country with more opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activities and country entrepreneurial intention is a positive moderator on this relationship. Our methodology of first two chapters involves survey data planning to gather from new ventures in China and collected dataset of CHFS (China Household Finance Survey) and methodology of chapter three involves existing country level dataset such as GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) and World Database of Happiness.